


Over the Threshold

by x_los



Category: David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Genre: Angst, Engagement, F/M, Home, Jealousy, Just Married, M/M, Oblivious, Pining, Unrequited Love, Victorian, Victorian Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-13 22:55:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21005516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: David Copperfield can't resist showing off his brand-new, hard-earned bridal cottage even to his own worst enemy, who is himself something of a masochist.





	Over the Threshold

David opened the door, and found he could not quite maintain the affable curiosity of his expression upon discovering who it was that had knocked at it. That knock had been the queerest, knuckle-rappingest piece of orchestral ostentation David could recollect having heard addressed to unoffending oak in all his life. Thus he really felt he ought to have guessed who was behind it, and the door.

“Uriah. What an unexpected surprise.”

“Oh, not an unpleasant one, I trust!” Uriah said with a writhe, as though he didn’t. “I had some business in the neighborhood, and asked Miss Agnes if she’d be so good as to entrust me with any little commission in my way. I was only too ‘appy to pay you a visit, Master Copperfield, especially as I’d yet to congratulate you on your upcoming nuptials!” He peered over David’s head in an exaggerated fashion. “What a sweet little cottage this is, Master Copperfield, from what I can see of it!”

It seemed David would be forced to invite _ Uriah Heep _ into his brand-new home, before even Dora had surveyed her intended domain. David had only taken up residence a week ago himself, though with his customary energy (and his great anticipation of the planned visit from all his friends, not to mention the day itself!) he’d pretty thoroughly unpacked, and gone hunting for as many necessaries as he could think of and afford besides. Would they need a toasting fork? Perhaps they would! Just imagine Dora laughing sweetly over the proceedings, burning the bread and offering the black bits to Jip, who’d turn his wet nose up at them while his mistress playfully scolded him for his delicacy. And buoyed by the delicious picture, off David had gone to explore the neighbourhood in search of an iron-monger. 

On one hand, David hated Uriah Heep as he hated precious few people in the world. The bad blood between them was pretty fresh at present. Uriah had elaborately forgiven David for his horrifying lapse of judgement the last time they’d met (when David had smacked Uriah so hard he’d managed to dislodge one of Uriah’s crooked teeth). His elaborate forgiveness made it impossible to discuss either the act or Uriah’s still-worse precipitating provocations. That same social shadowboxing, which Uriah was a master of, rendered David unable to snatch the letter from his hand and let the door slam in his lank and loathsome face. 

Besides all that, David was desperately eager to show someone, _ anyone, _ his new marital bower: the pride of his fresh-made manhood. Even, apparently, Uriah. Very likely he’d have offered Satan himself tea. 

David had no sooner forced out a “Won’t you come in?” than Uriah, seemingly having expected to be asked, demured with a terrible shriek. David oughtn’t to condescend to him so much as that. Oh, he couldn’t impose. He couldn’t! 

But in the end he could, and did, and swanned in with what David thought a rather queer aggression, dropping his commissioned letter on the tiled hall-table like a dead fish. 

“Shall I show you the place?” David asked, torn between affected disinterest and a genuine admixture of eagerness both to admit Uriah deeper into, and to banish him from, the house (and to subsequently expel him from the county, or even the Earth, if possible). 

Uriah, turning towards him after making a minute inspection of the wall-paper, seemed to set his jaw. His eyes glinted with what David supposed must be curiosity. 

“Oh yes, let’s have it all!”

If David had, in part, hoped to impress Uriah, who’d seemed to him a man when they were both but boys, he was not destined to succeed. Uriah was as obsequious as ever, but full of treacly barbed observations on David’s arrangements. The paper made a pretty cheerful show, even if it wasn’t the bright, painted silk paneling you saw in grand drawing rooms! That must be difficult to keep up even if you could get it, dear as it was. You’d very likely need to be able to hire a maid just for the purpose! What a shame it was that newer houses like this fresh, charming cottage lacked the rich wood paneling of the Wickfield home (which he now occupied himself, sleeping in David’s very room), and other such fine residences. Still, the whole place looked pretty airy, which was cheerful after its own fashion.

There was no outright insult in any of this. It might even have been intended as a good natured demonstration of fellow-feeling. Yet it did serve to make David feel his comparative poverty, and the shabby limitations of his homemaking. Hard as he’d worked for this, it was not the home Dora had grown up in, or he himself had first hoped to offer her and provide for himself. It fell short not only of his dreams, but of his once reasonable expectations. Had Uriah meant to accomplish exactly this? To bring about this somewhat shameful disquiet in him? God alone knew. Even if it had been meant quite kindly, and said in earnest, the ugliest part of David--which he suspected Uriah knew all about--rebelled at any attempt of Uriah’s to put the two of them on an equal footing. 

Uriah refrained from offering any comment whatever on Dora’s massive Chinese pagoda, intended for Jip, which took up a full quarter of the living room. David flushed when they came to it, feeling embarrassed and defensive even in the face of Uriah’s silence. The as-yet ill-appointed kitchen had Uriah theatrically biting his thin lips, as if determined to keep his peace, and simply nodding when David tried to breezily observe that he hoped whatever girl they employed might bring some tools of her own (it was only then that David realised, contrary to the custom of service-provision in furnished lodgings, that would not be the way of it at all, that his household would require a good deal more than a pretty toasting fork, and that he’d failed to budget accordingly). However as they ascended the stairs to complete the tour above, Uriah offered under his breath that “this pale runner won’t be half difficult to clean.” 

David actually stopped in his tracks. Yes. Yes, of course, it would. He’d not thought of it. His Aunt Betsey hadn’t either, very likely because she hadn’t lived in a house with carpeted stairs since she’d had a girl living with her expresely to help her--and his Aunt was a good deal busier about the house than David (even at his most sanguine) believed Dora would be. That wasn’t Dora’s fault. Betsey Trotwood’s character prompted her to more determined activity than almost any person breathing. Dust wouldn’t dare settle in her house. It would in David Copperfield’s, though, especially when he was out terribly late reporting on debates, dragging home street-muddy shoes at all hours, too tired to take the boot-jack to them at the landing before slumping up to bed. Damn. _ Damn_. Was it too late to return the carpet? Yes, of course it was. _ Damn! _

“Of course,” Uriah said slowly, “you are not so used to having to worry about such trivialities as I am! It’s only natural. Why should you, when you are so more respectable than I ever will be? And so, I’m sure, is Mrs Copperfield, as will be.” 

David could hear the smug, fawning smile curling through his voice. He didn’t bother turning around just to see Uriah hastily conceal it. 

“Missus Copperfield,” Uriah repeated, sounding less pleased with himself. Less pleased in general. “Why I really will have to put a stop my little abit of still calling you Master Copperfield, when you’ve a Missus to compliment the Mister. My, how you’ve grown since first we met.”

It was precisely what twenty-one year-old David would have liked to have heard, if he’d been able to convince himself Uriah meant it. If they weren’t standing on fashionable cream roses set in large medallions, destined to become blotches set in wobbly smears inside a year. Two entire hard-earned pounds, wasted.

Uriah had never met Dora Spenlow, whose new title he pushed about his mouth in a lingering fashion like some morsel he wasn’t certain he liked the taste of. The prospect of such an encounter made David unaccountably nervous. David was confident that Uriah couldn’t discomfort poor Dora by saying anything awful, because his accustomed barbs would find no purchase in her innocent mind. His veiled aggression wouldn’t so much as register for Dora, who liked anything serious said gently and plainly, or better yet not said at all. Yet he knew Uriah would disapprove of Dora (as though he’d any right whatever to think ill of such an angel!). Worse, David knew that Uriah’s dislike, conveyed in knowing words and looks which David himself was not innocent enough to miss the import of, would push slinking, shameful doubt into his own heart. He knew also that Dora would be particularly uncharitable towards Uriah, who wasn’t nice to look upon as she herself was, and who, in his ‘umility’, didn’t present a charming subject for Dora’s sympathy and pity. Even as association with Agnes made Dora a dearer version of herself, David saw that the corrupting influence of Uriah would call forth Dora’s least lovely aspect, and bring out some canker in her rose. Well, was it any wonder? David asked himself defensively. Uriah provoked his own worst impulses as well (another source of private shame). 

Uriah made an obtrusively unobtrusive motion, recalling David to the fact that he’d been standing halfway up a staircase, fuming, for the better part of a minute. Without comment, David began to walk on. Seeing he’d scored a hit seemed to embolden Uriah. When they reached the landing he spotted the books on domestic subjects that David had purchased for Dora and appealingly arranged on a little shelf in the hall. Uriah commended David on his course of self improvement--as though David was the target audience for “A Young Gentlewoman’s Guide to Household Mending and Adornment, With A Key to Patternmaking”. David took a deep breath, and said that while those belonged to his intended wife (he strategically opted not to mention that she’d never so much as opened them), for his own part he’d undertaken to arrange all their coal and most of their essential deliveries for the coming year, having made a survey of the merchants here about. He’d stopped in at the local pubs to ask the assembled what sort of rates they thought proper and which tradesmen they dealt with. David offhandedly mentioned that he knew now just who to call if, say, a window broke, and ‘round about what that man ought to charge him.

“You_ are _making a thorough go of it,” Uriah said. What a queer, bitter note his voice seemed to strike! It was far from pleasant to hear, and yet it was bracingly fresh to David’s ears, in that it sounded more honest than ever Uriah did. For almost the first time, David wondered whether Uriah truly longed to wed Agnes to the extent that David’s own marriage and all pertaining to it galled Uriah as much as that. That would hardly preclude Uriah having sought this visit, for it would be just like him to insist on plunging into a vat of hot tar just to spite himself, and to deliberately flail about to splash others with the boiling pitch as he went. David realised that, strange as it was, he’d never given the idea that Uriah might truly love Agnes, and suffer for it, much thought. Now that he considered it, he found it hardly likely. There was nothing in Uriah’s looks or his words to David’s dear sister, before David these many years or delivered up via her own report, that indicated that sort of feeling. Which of course made Uriah’s elaborate scheming and attendant charade all the more baffling, cruel and inexcusable. Was all Uriah had undertaken done simply for her money, when that same amount of energetic, honest labour for masters he resented less might have earned him a sound sum in his own right?

Uriah interrupted David’s contemplations. “Anyone would think _ you _ were the dear little wife, Master Copperfield, given how careful and clever you are with your household affairs, despite your youth an’ inexperience! You may be green, but only because you’re wick an’ growing!”

Uriah’s front of ingratiating cheer had been put up once more, but the plaster was still setting, and his facade was accordingly brittle. If Uriah had been any other man, David would have asked him if he were well. Even given the man he was, David hesitated, considering it. 

“Your intended must be quite a careful sort of lady,” Uriah pressed on hastily. “Why, the spines of her books don’t so much as look cracked! Such is the delicacy of a gentlewoman, I expect.” He tsked. “My own are all pretty hard-used, and look it.” 

David tried not to visibly wince at having been caught out in pretending that Dora was as hard at work preparing to make their life together comfortable and pleasant as he himself was. What had Uriah heard about Dora? Agnes would have been kind, but scrupulously accurate. Uriah would have drawn his own, perhaps uncharitable conclusions from what she did and didn’t say. Perhaps it ought to have surprised David that Uriah cared enough to seek out and store up such an account, but then Uriah was always hard working, in his grasping way, and too ready to remember unflattering information about other people. About David, in whom he’d long evinced a particular interest. David supposed that Uriah had been about the house he’d lived in for his whole youth pretty constantly. That he now slept in David’s very room. That he had years’ worth of experience and ample evidence upon which to base conclusions about David’s preferences. Uriah might simply have watched and listened to all going on around him, and by such innocuous means might know David and all he hoped for from a home about as well as anyone did. 

“An unusual spot for a book case, ain’t it?” Uriah asked, gesturing to the article snugly situated on the upstairs landing with his long hand. David opened his mouth to say that of course they’d read in bed--that, after all, was how he fell asleep each evening. At the Wickfields’ he’d had a little desk-shelf within reach of his hand from the bed. But now that he considered it, he expected Dora would read in the parlour if she saw him doing it or not at all. Soon his evenings would bend around her preference for idle chat and playing with Jip before sleep. Too lovely to imagine, of course--but even so, David would miss reading in bed. Thus, he ought to move the book case. And perhaps it had been an idle remark. Or perhaps Uriah had guessed this of Dora before David himself had. 

“It’s only waiting to come downstairs. The porters mistakenly sent it up.” David lied easily. Uriah didn’t need to know any more than he evidently did about the intimate details of David’s life, or about his trivial, manageable disappointments. 

Uriah strangely hesitated to enter David’s bedroom. It was already charged, in David’s imagination, with the heady charm of Dora. She would imminently occupy it, and in so doing make him a husband and man, herself a wife and woman. But after taking an audible breath Uriah plunged into the room with a queer screw of his face. He closed his eyes for but a moment, then turned about to look around him. 

“Oh,” Uriah murmured, seemingly struck. “My--Copperfield. I’ve never seen the like.”

Now this, David was a little proud of. The bedframe had been cheap, and the paint too, but David was a fair hand at copying, and the effect was more than the sum of its parts. He’d drawn and painted in a bower of vines on the frame, until it looked like part of a living forest--like the great still-growing bed of Ulyses and Penelope, or a fairy bower fit for his Dora. They would soon (David blushed to think it) make love in a bed embellished by his own hands. He’d laboured to earn it, and to enrich it. He’d lay those same hands with reverent love on his precious Dora, with equal commitment to making good come of their union and doing the thing as well as his considerable patience and determination would allow. 

“Oh, how rustic.” Uriah said. David thought he tried to sneer, but his breath caught as though something were stuck in his throat. David noticed with annoyance that it was his nicest contrivances--the touches he’d put the most of himself unmistakably into--that seemed to afford Uriah the most fodder for mockery. 

Uriah wrenched his eyes from the bed and turned towards David. His eyes widened, as though he’d hoped to find the change of view an improvement, but had not. He raised his hand with a queer jerk, but then it dropped back to his side. David had no notion what he was about.

“You look so well,” Uriah said suddenly, sounding offended. A moment later, while David searched for some response to a compliment he couldn’t himself reciprocate (Uriah looked paler even than usual, and his eyes burned hot), Uriah laughed unpleasantly. “Your new home is so very well set up, Master Copperfield! Don’t mind a few little privations, here and there--your taste is yet a gentleman’s, and it pervades the whole pretty thoroughly! This could be no one’s home but yours. And how _ well _you seem to find yourself, despite your Aunt’s unfortunate turn! You must be earning nicely, with all your hard work in Parliament and the papers! I see your name there every week, at least! It’s not polite to talk about, I know, but such friends as still hold you dear back in the city of your education were rather afraid that bad business of Miss Trotwood’s might hamper your prospects, and delay such a blissful event as this. Thankfully, it hasn’t!” He ended on a high note, reedy, speaking and breathing too fast. 

While David was curiously wary of Uriah and Dora’s meeting one another, he couldn’t stop himself from speaking of his love for her: the carefully-nurtured flame that had kept him warm when the fire had burned low in the night, when there’d been no coal to feed it. 

“I have worked in a desperate fever of love these past months, Uriah,” David admitted with a candid boldness born of that fond rapture. “I could never have managed to learn shorthand, but for my Dora!” True she’d never helped him in that educational pursuit, but it had been_ for _her--oh, what the love of her had made of him! Even such setbacks as he’d faced could never stand against the ardour of his earnest young heart! “I would have done anything moral to hasten the time to our wedding.” 

David leaned against the painted bedpost. He wore a dreamy, besotted expression, and was so under the spell of love that he didn’t even scruple to do so before odious Uriah, whose own face was blank. This was strange, as it was usually so expressive--lying, according to Uriah’s careful program of disinformation, but nonetheless communicative. Now, for once, it was silent, and Uriah’s customary jerks had subsided into a profound, unnerving stillness. 

“Only anything moral, eh?” Uriah murmured, scraping his chin with his great hand.

David frowned, confused, wondering what Heep was about. “I suspect that perhaps you don’t understand my meaning.”

“Oh, that’s very likely,” Uriah said. “I ave risen somewhat in the world, but I’ve my limits, and I expect I always will ave em. I know em pretty well by now.”

David frowned, made uncomfortable, as always, by Uriah’s pointed manner of self-abnegation.

“People can, and do, alter, Uriah. You’ve proven yourself to have considerable abilities. I’m sure you needn’t feel constrained by your present understanding, should you wish to improve it.”

“It isn’t,” Uriah said, “exactly a question of what I think, Mister Copperfield. Some constraints ain’t internal affairs. I’m sure if you consider the question, you’ll see what I mean. Shall we go down?”

They descended the stairs, and David offered the obligatory tea. Uriah said he couldn’t _ possibly_. He did sound as though that were the case. He looked more unwell than ever. There was a pall over his voice that David thought might be anger. He wondered at it, for he’d never seen Uriah truly angry before. Not even when David had slapped him. 

Uriah saw himself out, and slammed the door as he went--or as near to it as someone so soft-footed and creeping could manage. David had half a mind to follow the man and ask whether he needed conveyed to a doctor, or to rest or take some reviving spirits. But he hesitated. He’d no great love for Uriah, who during this strange encounter had made himself about as unpleasant as ever. So David let the thing lie, and returned to his work. After all, he’d deadlines. On these rode the finances that would enable him to, very soon indeed, marry and keep Dora Spenlow. 

And yet at odd times the memory of the bad fairy’s visit did return to trouble David’s peace. When dear Peggotty came to clean the place from top to bottom to welcome the bride, some sliver of David’s appreciation of her kindness was spoilt for him. He now wondered whether this was an expression of his old nurse’s devotion, a motherly gift given upon his reaching man’s estate, or a kinder expression of something like Heep’s matter-of-fact superiority regarding David’s comparative inability to keep a thrifty, economic home in tight conditions. Every time some friend--even Dora!--complimented him on just the personal efforts which Uriah had unfailingly noticed in the most condescending terms civility allowed, David felt a faint trace of the anxiety attendant on there having been some jarring note in the chorus of Uriah’s mockery that he hadn’t understood. Many years would pass before David, in the process of composing his private memoirs, gave thought to what all this might have been born of, or could have meant. He was sure of nothing, but even the vague suspicions that pressed upon him, if there were any truth to them at all, were of such consequence that David elected to suppress them, even in this solipsistic account. Even within himself.   


**Author's Note:**

> The rug pattern is on-trend for this decade, but I couldn't find a good price estimate, so £2 is a wild guess. Please comment if you know the price of a decent but not ostentatious trendy stair-runner in 1841.
> 
> The estimate the beta @elviaprose and I came to is based off 3 yards, this US calculation (about $1.89) and the current loose relationship between exchange rates and value for money in the two countries, but that leaves much to be desired. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044050806330&view=1up&seq=89


End file.
